"Captain America: Super Soldier" Dossier #1

With the Fourth of July just around the corner, SEGA’s upcoming title "Captain America: Super Soldier" is about to hit full stride before its release on July 19, 2011. In order to get players ready to take control of the first avenger, the teams behind "Captain America: Super Soldier" at Next Level Games and SEGA will be releasing insider details over the coming weeks highlighting various aspects of the game in an ongoing series of development dossiers. The dossiers are written directly from the development team and give great insight into the development process of the game from inspiration to conception to completion.

This first dossier provides an overview of how the team went about designing the setting for the game, which takes place in a sprawling and elaborate European castle.

The following dossier was provided by Marvel Entertainment and Sega.

Captain America: Super Soldier - Dossier 1 - Environments

In this all new behind the scenes feature for "Captain America: Super Soldier," Art Director at Next Level Games, Barret Chapman gives us a behind-the-scenes look the various environments players will experience while playing Captain America: Super Soldier.

Written by Barret Chapman, Art Director, Next Level Games

The motivations of our villains is really what drove the decision to set our game in Zemo's Castle. We needed a place where Red Skull could set Arnim Zola up to conduct his research.

In the comics there is a long standing power struggle between Red Skull and Baron Zemo, so it seemed fitting that the Skull would have usurped his rival’s ancestral home for the benefit of Hydra.

Inspiration was taken from the Ksiaz Castle in Poland. During WW2 the castle was home to Project Riese. An underground complex was created to construct Hitler’s headquarters and armaments factories.

We loved the idea of a secret underground complex and thought a similar setting would work perfectly for what our villains were up to. Visually we loved the look of the Castle proper as well, as it had the sense of history and varying types of architecture that we were looking for.

The designs for the main areas of the castle are all driven by the story, the Labs, the Cellblock, the Thermal Plant all service the main narrative. The other areas were conceived as mission objectives with the goal to inject as much history and visual back-story as we could into the castle.

What would Cap do if he found himself here? What are Zola and Hydra actually up to? How did they go about constructing the underground complex…where did the materials come from?

These were all questions we needed to answer to create a plausible, immersive setting for the game. The exercise of answering these questions provided us with a bunch of cool locations to populate the rest of the castle.

Once these settings were established we worked with Christos Gage to string the narrative through and tie it all nicely together.